Word: wordplay
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...schizophrenic, to be exact--but it's a nice mad, not angry or morose. In a spray of wildly allusive wordplay, David Helfgott natters compulsively, cheerfully, to himself. Popular cinema loves head cases, especially when their condition is as endearing as David's. Because he was once a pianist of great promise, and because his is a true story, Helfgott is an ideal vessel for the awe and pity of the middle-class moviegoer in search of an elevating experience. Shine, an entertaining, way-too-canny Australian film written by Jan Sardi and directed by Scott Hicks, encourages a kind...
...Houston Grand Opera gives new life to Thomson's hothouse flower. The production, which runs through the end of this week and will be seen this summer at the new Lincoln Center Festival in New York City, is the perfect marriage of director and subject. Stein's wordplay and Thomson's homespun music are direct antecedents of such minimalist classics as Wilson's 1969 The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud and the 1976 Wilson--Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV DIED IN 1977 to mixed reviews. Not everyone was captivated by his erudition, multilingual wordplay and narrative frolics. But those who tuned to his wavelength came to appreciate that the style and gamesmanship so intimidating to his competition disguised the author's larger task: to heighten the pleasures of the natural world and the gratifications of personal creativity...
...lyrics for Gypsy and West Side Story were behind him; A Little Night Music and Follies were soon to come. This revival provides a useful vantage for surveying the second half of a venturesome, glittering career. Among those American artists today whose livelihood is linked to words and wordplay, Sondheim holds a unique preeminence. There's no contemporary novelist, poet or essayist who is so indisputably at the top of his or her field as Sondheim is of his. As a song lyricist, he has no plausible peer...
...barbaric violence Chagnon documented is in some ways misleading. Though strife does pervade primitive societies, much of the striving is subtler than a club fight. Our ancestors, it seems, competed for mates with guile and hard work. They competed for social status with combative wordplay and social politicking. And this competition, however subtle, had Darwinian consequences. Anthropologists have shown, for example, that hunter-gatherer males successful in status competition have better luck in mating and thus getting genes into the next generation...